It wasn’t true, either, that popular American Shakespeare had breathed its last in the middle of the nineteenth century. At the Folger I’d ordered a DVD of the oldest surviving full-length American feature film. It was blind luck that it happened to be Shakespeare (older movies had perished), but it was nonetheless intriguing to find it was a version of Richard III. Dating from 1912, the picture was 5,000 feet and 55 minutes long, and starred the great English-born actor Frederick B. Warde. The story of its rediscovery was remarkable: a former projectionist from Oregon had kept it in his garage for thirty-five years, carefully looking after the friable – and highly flammable – nitrate reels.
Richard III was in every way a prestige, ‘highbrow’ release: it featured hundreds of extras, elaborately medieval sets and a spectacular amount of expensive location work, including a Battle of Bosworth filmed in upstate New York that gave Olivier’s version forty-three years later a run for its money.
Yet in certain ways it was gloriously populist. The most watchable thing was Warde’s Richard: malevolently funny, with a limp dangerously close to an orang-utan’s lope and a menacing habit of removing his leather gauntlets finger by finger. His wooing of Lady Anne was a bravura piece of acting: bursting from a hedge like a fox, he allowed himself a snigger that was practically audible, before falling to his knees. Less than a minute of screen time later, Anne was in his arms.
Made long before synchronous sound, the script was nowhere to be heard, but Warde seemed to cram in the entire text nonetheless, transforming its rhetoric into witty pieces of silent ballet (the circling of the ring around Lady Anne’s finger, a light kiss of the fingers bidding adieu to his unlucky brother Clarence). This Richard III was streets ahead of any filmed Shakespeare that had yet been produced back in Britain – a two-reel, twenty-minute version of the play from 1911 starring the renowned Stratford actor Frank Benson was infinitely less sophisticated, largely static scenes shot in front of painted flats.
The film was also, it occurred to me, something much more precious: a living link with the Richards of the nineteenth century. Until its rediscovery, Warde was the great lost hero of American theatre, omitted from most histories despite a career that stretched over half a century, from the 1860s to the 1920s. Born in Oxfordshire in 1851, he had trained as a ‘utility’ or general-purpose actor before coming to America in 1874. Unlike many actors, who preferred to remain in the comforts of New York, he arranged a touring schedule that took him to every whistle-stop and one-horse town he could reach by rail, from Nashville to Little Rock to San Francisco to Bloomington, Illinois. For twenty-four years, Warde played up to two hundred and twenty shows a season, specialising in Shakespeare productions cut to the quick.
New York audiences, by then accustomed to their Bard being presented with more finesse, disdained him; it was out on the circuit that Warde found his audience. In LaCrosse, Wisconsin, Warde’s Lear was acclaimed as ‘powerful in every scene’; in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, his Mark Antony in Julius Caesar was ‘beyond all praise’. One journalist wrote: ‘These old legits, according to our quiet ideas, rant and rave … in a way that would doubtless prove highly amusing to our white-gloved, low-voiced beperfumed New York audience, but it is too bad for the sake of youthful theatregoers we cannot have a short season with these old players once a year, just to show us from what we are advancing – or deteriorating.’
And the tradition of Shakespeare-inspired burlesque, too, continued just as contentedly. Shortly before I left England a friend had sent me a little piece of video, a YouTube clip of something called Shakespearian Spinach. It was a black-and-white Popeye cartoon made in 1940 by Fleischer Studios. Popeye the sailor was cast as a Shakespearian actor playing Romeo; the villainous Bluto his top-hatted, cape-wearing antagonist. Olive Oyl, being Popeye’s rightful sweetheart, was of course Juliet (complete with ear trumpet).
The plot runs something like this. Hearing that he has been replaced on the bill, Bluto is bent on revenge and deploys every dirty backstage trick available, from attempting to bump off Popeye with the front cloth to locking him in a costume trunk. Popeye retaliates in inimitable fashion: after Olive throws him a wreath made from his favourite iron-rich brassica, he windmill-punches Bluto into the flies of the theatre, and gets the girl in time for curtain-down. ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow,’ he growls joyously over his recumbent enemy. All in six and a half minutes.
There was even a knowing spin on Shakespearian cross-dressing, with the pipe-smoking hero slipping into Juliet’s costume in order to biff Bluto in the kisser. And was it possible to see in this grudge match between an Eminent Tragedian and a plucky Native a hint of Macready and Forrest and the Astor Place Riot? I wouldn’t put it past the Fleischers, canny New Yorkers both.
The roads up into the Sierras were twisting rat’s tails, winding and jackknifing every which way. Within moments of leaving the highway I was into dense forest, stacks of pines either side of the road and sharp cliffs of rusty rock stippled with dry scrub. Though there was the occasional small settlement, most houses were solitary, buried in their own little fastnesses, offering little more to the nosy passer-by than a postbox and perhaps a trash can or two. The only buildings with any prominence were the fire stations, of which there seemed to be considerably more than there were houses.
The roads told a story about the past, but what it was, I could only guess. Lady Bug Lane, Stagecoach Way, Nugget Lane and Black Bear Lane slid past. Slave Girl Lane was straightforward enough – a depressing reminder of California’s Native American population, thousands of whom were sold into servitude by settlers. But Mystery Lane? It was a mystery.
My first destination was a place that went under the picturesque moniker of Rough and Ready (named for ‘Old Rough and Ready’ Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican wars who became president just as the Gold Rush hit). At its zenith Rough and Ready was one of the largest towns in California, home to nearly 4,000 souls and, moreover, so confident of its own importance that in 1850 its citizens voted to secede from the Union entirely and form the Great Republic of Rough and Ready – the only recorded instance of such a thing in American history. The breakaway nation lasted just three months; all over, like so many things in America, by 4 July.
But where was it? Barrelling along the Rough and Ready Highway – an impressive name for an anorexic strip of blacktop – I shot straight through Rough and Ready itself without noticing. I was ten minutes past before I skidded to a halt and rechecked the map. Was that really the town?
Coming the other way, I successfully registered the red-brick fire department and a worn clapboard structure marked ‘General Blacksmith’. But I couldn’t work out for the life of me where Rough and Ready actually was.
It was only when I swung the car around for the third time that I saw it, or saw something: a fire bell and a toy-sized saloon, in front of a tawny stretch of flattened grass. A covered wagon was planted against a fence, opposite a dainty collection of freight cars. Above a miniature post office, Old Glory fluttered lazily. Stencilled on the side of the too-small water tower, in counterfeit nineteenth-century type, was a sign: THE LITTLE TOWN OF ROUGH AND READY.
Rough and Ready had not only dematerialised; it had suffered the insult of being scaled down to one-third life size. This was, apparently, Ye Olde Wilde West erected by some backwoods entrepreneur, a photo stop that compressed the Gold Rush into a single convenient frame.
The reason I had wanted to come to Rough and Ready was that there was also a theatre, or had been, on the second floor of what was once Downie’s hotel. Stanley Kimmel’s The Mad Booths of Maryland, which tells the history of the Booth acting dynasty in spirited detail, records that Rough and Ready’s inhabitants refused point-blank to attend the theatre in Grass Valley, four and a half miles away, believing their own auditorium to be the finest in the area. This, unfortunately, didn’t correlate with its durability: one company were applauded with such frenzy that the floor collapsed.
Where was the hotel now? No si
gn, unless it was buried underneath the miniature water tower. I paid my respects at the cemetery and drove on.
I had been prepared for little from the Gold Rush to have survived, but it was nonetheless a shock to find how much had gone. Back in London, archaeologists had recently discovered the foundations of the very first theatres Shakespeare had worked at, the Theatre and the Curtain, built in 1576 and 1577 respectively in Shoreditch, just north-east of the City of London. In each case the remains weren’t much more than a handful of Tudor bricks, but the sites had still yielded precious evidence – broken drinking vessels, shards of the earthenware cash boxes that gave the box office its historic name. (The great innovation of Tudor theatre was to make audiences pay before they saw the show rather than handing round the hat afterwards – in London, at any rate: one touring company demanded the same in Norwich in 1583, and provoked a riot from locals unused to such metropolitan affectations.)
Here in California, though, J. D. Borthwick was dead right: life moved at blinding speed. A hundred and sixty years, a series of fires and the particular desuetude that comes from a live-fast-while-you-can culture had worked the destruction of centuries.
A town called Auburn, which I drove down to next, had a handful of surviving Gold Rush buildings, but no sign of a theatre. Same story in Placerville, née Hangtown. So much had gone. By the time Walter Leman had arrived in California in 1854, ‘almost every mining town possessed a building devoted to theatrical uses’. This didn’t mean an actual theatre, he was quick to point out: one was a ‘schoolroom, crowded to suffocation’; Placerville’s was an old hall where a huge pillar blocked the middle of the room (which ‘Buck’ Buchanan managed to turn to his advantage as Shylock, seizing it on the lines, ‘You take my house, when you do take the prop | That doth sustain my house’).
Another had a stage knocked together from two billiard tables. In Calaveras County, a hundred miles south, the Chapmans were said to have played on the stump of a giant redwood tree. In several others, Leman wrote, it was impossible to perform Richard III without ‘Bosworth Field [being] knocked all to pieces … for want of room to get on and off the stage’.
My final destination that day was both beautiful and melancholy: the immense Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park, high in the Sierra Nevadas, forty-odd miles north of Auburn. As the road corkscrewed around and up, I concentrated on glueing the car to the yellow centre line. Every so often an expanse of mountains, blue and hazy in the heat, flashed past before the trees closed in. The FM signal was getting dickery, and the Christian rock station, the only one I could find, kept disappearing. Eventually it sank beneath a sea of profane hiss.
Malakoff Diggins had its origins in 1852, when a group of miners set out from lower ground to find virgin territory. That territory, like so much of the United States, was of course already occupied, here by the Hill Nisenan. Those Indians that had not been killed by marauding parties of soldiers or miners, or died of diseases that had been introduced by the Spanish, now saw the habitat they relied on wiped out. Much good Manifest Destiny and the spread of white culture did them.
I’d been looking for marks of the past: well, they were all around me. Foul-looking lakes in the hollows of canyons, with water the colour of industrial disinfectant, laced with mercury left over from the gold-ore refining process. Entire hillsides rinsed clear of topsoil, a few stubby long-needled pines clinging desperately on. Apart from the water, the colours were all grey and bruise-red. Bad things had happened here.
I parked next to a sign heralding North Bloomfield, the town founded by the miners, since abandoned. By the 1850s North Bloomfield had a population in the hundreds, then, rapidly, the thousands; now, it was ‘pop. 8–12’. The road was a wide tree-lined avenue that would not have looked out of place in a Parisian suburb; either side ran white picket fences and a small street of houses. Many were freshly painted. The park rangers must have been responsible (you could book to stay here in the summer), but it gave North Bloomfield the wary, suspenseful air of Picnic at Hanging Rock, as if everyone had popped out and simply melted away. The only sound was the rustling of the forest and the crackle of pine needles beneath my feet.
I scuffed along the deserted Main Street, peering into the restored buildings. At the druggist, lined with bottles on freshly painted shelves, it looked as if someone had simply gone out back to make up a prescription. The post office was piled high with still-to-be-sorted mail. Inside the clapboard chapel, its paint gleaming, was a life-size statue of St Francis welcoming his flock, so lifelike he might have been about to saunter across and seize my hand. I realised I was shivering, despite the heat.
Trying to ignore my heebie-jeebies – amplified by the warning notices about bears and the fact that I had no mobile phone signal – I stood in front of the saloon. It had rough timber walls, a scattering of battered tables and chairs, a piano pushed to one side, a long wooden bar. Lager and whiskey bottles glinted on the shelves. It wasn’t at all hard to imagine visiting actors putting on a show here. But the sense that their ghosts were hovering was rather too strong for my liking. I snapped a few pictures and hastened back to the car.
‘It’s a darn pity, that’s what it is. You’ve come just as we’ve closed Antony.’
I had arranged to meet John McDade at 10 a.m. Squinting in the sun, I had seen only shadows. Abruptly, one shadow detached itself and resolved into the thin, stooping figure of a man. He wore glasses, a faded Hawaiian shirt, black trousers worn to a lizard sheen, and had a lugubrious, seen-it-all-before air. He shook my hand distractedly. I wondered whether Leman and his colleagues had in their repertoire a stock character called Theatre Manager.
From the street, the Nevada theatre didn’t look much: two windows, two doors, a modest two-storey facade in russet brick. But the interesting thing about the Nevada was its history. If the accounts I’d read were accurate, this was California’s oldest working theatre. Located in Nevada City – where J. D. Borthwick had his surprise nocturnal encounter with Richard III – it was the seventh theatre to be raised in the town, which at its height was the third-largest settlement in the state. The Nevada was the only one to have made it to the present, a lone survivor from the earliest days of Californian drama.
Were my sources correct? I asked McDade as we headed in. Was this actually California’s oldest theatre?
He sorted his words with care. ‘The correct definition is it’s the oldest original-use theatre building. If push came to shove, I would have to say the Eagle in Sacramento is older, but that’s a reconstruction. The oldest theatre is in Monterey, but it’s currently closed.’ He pursed his lips in melancholy satisfaction. ‘I don’t reckon it meets earthquake standards any longer.’
The Nevada’s story was eloquent about the hardships of life in Gold Rush California, but also the buoyant optimism of those who participated. It was built on the ruins of a hotel that had burnt to the ground in 1851, then again in 1856, then once again in 1858. Reopened in 1860, the hotel lasted just three years before again going up in one of the fires that ravaged every jerry-built, overpopulated Gold Rush town.
Perhaps reasoning that the gods had made their views clear when it came to hotels, Nevada City residents formed a theatre association, with the aim of erecting a more splendidly appointed auditorium than the town had yet seen. Despite yet more bad luck when the scheduled opening was delayed by the nationwide mourning for President Lincoln, it finally opened in September 1865.
The Nevada’s original facilities were impressive – gas lighting, with an elaborately painted scenic drop curtain, a stage 45 feet wide and 28 feet deep and a 10-foot basement. There was no lobby, meaning that it could cram in 750 seats, with more audience standing.
We were now in the auditorium, modestly sized, painted vermilion and scarlet, with a blocky proscenium arch and shallow stage behind. None of the original ornamentation had survived; it had a functional appearance, deliberately unfancy. The wavering bumps and lumps in the brickwork made it look as though someon
e had tried to iron the walls flat and failed. Like all theatres seen during the daytime, the place had a raffish and disreputable air. I knew and liked it well: the heavy scent of seat cloth and antique gloss paint. In the shaft of sunlight streaming through an open fire escape, the dust lifted and tumbled in lazy clouds.
Its spells as a movie house in the early twentieth century had taken their toll, McDade explained, pointing out the 1930s seating and a balcony added in the 1940s. A shallow rake had gone in, and the flies above the stage had been removed. But in all other respects, the Nevada was essentially the same as when companies played here in the 1860s.
It seemed impressive, I said, that the building had been entertaining people almost non-stop for 140 years.
McDade allowed himself a smile. ‘Hundred-fifty, coming up.’
Rather too aware of my experiences in North Bloomfield, I wondered if he ever thought of the spirits of performers past.
He prodded his glasses thoughtfully up his nose. ‘I ain’t never seen the ghost. But we’ve had paranormal investigators here a couple times.’
There was an actual ghost?
‘That’s the story. Hell if I know. But historical ghosts? I don’t worry about those too much. We’ve gone from Mark Twain to Mötley Crüe.’
He left me standing in the middle of the stage. I wasn’t entirely sorry to have missed Antony and Cleopatra: its absence meant that the space was bare, largely as it would have been originally. Twelve or so rows of maroon leatherette seats were ranged below me, the back wall almost close enough to touch. It looked a comfortable size for Shakespeare.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 22
